1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to a key, and more particularly, to using personal information as a key when distributing information over a communications network.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the advent of the world wide web (WWW) and the Internet, it has become more and more difficult to distribute materials over the WWW without the fear of illegal replication. For example, books or CD quality music are available on the WWW through a direct path between authors or musicians and the end users. However, it is extremely easy for anyone to replicate and distribute this material to an unlimited number of people over the Internet. Because of this, most authors and musicians are not willing to make their works available on the WWW. Therefore, to make electronic information distribution feasible, a mechanism is needed to make replication and distribution difficult for most people.
One way to protect information is to encrypt it. In any encryption mechanism, the object is to make it difficult to disseminate unauthorized information. There are several methods for encryption. Almost all of the encryption methods are based on the use of a "key" for decryption of the encrypted material. A private key is usually one that is difficult to decipher. In many cases, it is a large prime number that would take a high speed computer a long time, up to many years to determine. A key can also be words or phrases that are unrelated or make no sense. These words or phrase are then converted to binary form.
However, with any of the known methods for determining a key, the person holding the key can give it to anyone. That person or persons can disseminate the information to anyone they want. At that point, there is no telling how many people will eventually have access to the key and it does not matter how difficult it is to determine the key since it was readily disclosed to others.